Happy 25th Anniversary, Literotica!

Twenty-five years ago today on November 21 1998, we registered the domain Literotica.com. Unbeknownst to us, it was the start of a journey that has defined our lives. If we'd have known then that billions of people around the world would visit the small HTML website we were working on, we may have been too intimated to launch it. As avid readers, we believed that the late 1990s web needed a modern alternative to the aging alt.sex.stories Usenet group. Our modest goals at the time were to improve the reading and story discovery experience, to give authors a place they'd be proud to call home, and to offer human moderation and safety (no popups, spyware, etc.) as an alternative to Usenet's increasing anarchy.

It didn't take long after Literotica's launch for us to realize that we were in over our heads. Almost immediately, we were kicked off our web host for "too many hits". Suggestions and feedback from readers and authors was overwhelming. HTML alone did not have the capabilities needed to build the features visitors were asking for. We weren't yet familiar with PHP, so we went to work learning PERL/CGI. The new requested features rolled out monthly while publishing formats like Erotic Audio and Interactive Stories were added (back when those required emerging technologies to implement). We survived the Dot-com bubble (turning down all offers to buy the site) and continued to grow into the early 2000s.

By the 2010s, Literotica had come into its own as the web's largest and most awesome community of erotica authors and readers. With the start of the smartphone era, we worked to make the site easy to use on mobile devices while continuing to roll out new features based on user feedback, just as we did back in 1998.

The list of accomplishments that the Literotica community pioneered would be long indeed - from early online forums to audio publishing and interactive stories, to web anthology publishing and ebook experiments, to one of the earliest and most popular adult mobile apps (before adult was banned by Apple and Google), to the numerous third party websites, magazines, publishing companies, and apps launched by current or ex-Literotica members. Nothing makes us happier over the years than hearing stories of the countless friendships and marriages that started with a connection inside the Literotica community.

As we look forward to the next twenty-five years of Literotica, we hope to continue the journey we've been on since 1998 - promoting writing and reading as pathways toward self improvement and promoting fictional storytelling as a safe way to explore our deepest fantasies and get to know ourselves and our fellow human beings.

We want to thank all of your for being a part of our lives for the last twenty-five years, and for letting Literotica be a part of your lives. A quarter of a century of storytelling by Literotica's amazing authors, audio creators, artists, and readers is something worth celebrating.

Please join us in wishing a very Happy Birthday to everyone in the Literotica Community! And enjoy the wonderful anthology: Literotica 25th Anniversary Challenge!